“Flickering Between the Bullet and the Hole”

Outline

“Between the Bullet and the Hole” is a film about ballistics as a field of study related to the motion and behavior of bullets, and about the role of women in early computing. It is a known fact that six women were engaging in the programming of the early ENIAC computer that was developed by the US Army for ballistic trajectory calculation purposes in 1946. In World War II, the main task of women engaged in ballistics research was to take two known data (launching site and point of impact) and guess from these the missing data in between. Featuring high speed bullet photography, bullet sound wave imagery, and other special imagery, as well as computer punch cards, etc., the work explores ways of understanding this gap between two points—the bullet and the hole, the victim and the victimizer, presence and absence. Today ballistics has become a field of scientific research that is not limited to military use alone, as it is also applied in space development among others. “Flickering Between the Bullet and the Hole” was made using a lenticular lens, so that in this work patterns change depending on the angle from which one looks at those two points.

In her interdisciplinary endeavors across the realms of installation, sound, movie, performance and sculpture, Aura SATZ creates works based on research and studies. She often investigates the history and use of twentieth-century inventions and the way technological advances have informed cultural shifts in communication and perception of proximity and distance.